


Little Extra Push

by kenzz_95



Series: Trektober 2020 [13]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, First Kiss, M/M, Terrible horrible no good very bad Jim Kirk ideas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26983207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenzz_95/pseuds/kenzz_95
Summary: Leonard is taking his basic flight course, which he hates, but Jim offers to help him with it, which he hates slightly less. As it turns out, though, he's got a particular hang up with landing, one that he can't seem to fix before the semester draws to a close and he has to take the test that will determine if he can get his flight certifications and a starship posting when he graduates. Knowing that Leonard just needs an extra push, Jim comes up with an idea, but it's not the best one...
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy
Series: Trektober 2020 [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948633
Comments: 6
Kudos: 58
Collections: Trektober 2020





	Little Extra Push

**Author's Note:**

> Trektober Day 13: Shuttlecraft
> 
> The "Jim teaches Bones how to fly" thing has been done before, but I wanted to take a stab at it anyways. Enjoy!

Leonard didn’t really know what was on Jim’s criminal record from before he’d ended up at the Academy. A random assortment of misdemeanors, as far as he knew, but Jim wasn’t volunteering the information and Leonard wasn’t asking because really it didn’t  _ matter _ . He was pretty sure, though, that trespassing or breaking and entering had to be somewhere on there because dammit that kid just showed up places. Specifically Leonard’s dorm room, at any and all hours of the day and never once actually buzzing the door beforehand. He’d never actually given Jim the code to his room, not that he wouldn’t have if Jim had asked for it or ever seemed to actually need it, but Jim seemed to always know it anyways. It was just something he’d come to get used to by the beginning of their third year at the Academy, he knew at any given time Jim was likely to just saunter into his room, already talking excitedly about something or ranting about how he’d failed the damn Maru or some other favorite Jim Kirk topic. There was no sense fighting it, and truth be told Leonard didn’t mind much anyways.

So Jim walking into Leonard’s room without warning after a long Thursday of classes was not surprising. The only thing that surprised him was what his friend was actually there for.

“Bones!” Jim greeted him excitedly, strolling into the room like he owned the damn place. He may as well have, really, for how often he was over. “I am going to teach you how to fly.”

“Next conversation topic, please,” Leonard requested, not looking up from the PADD he was scrolling through at his desk. The last thing he wanted to talk about right now was his damn basic flight class. He’d rather listen to Jim talk about how he was going to take the Maru again, and that was really saying something because he was getting so damn tired of hearing about that. Someday he was going to find the person who programmed that test and kill them for inadvertently subjecting him to Jim’s rants about it for sometimes hours on end. Really. That kid could be long winded when he was worked up about something. But right now he was trying to study for an exam in his advanced xeno-bacteriology class, drink some of his good bourbon, and not think about either the Maru or his basic flight class. Was that really too much to ask?

“I heard you totally choked today,” Jim stated casually. Leonard had no idea how Jim had heard that, but he really did not want to think about the events of that morning. He’d really thought he was doing better. After all, he had spent the entire summer while Jim was off planet on his practicum meeting with a damn ‘fleet psychologist twice a week and he’d hated the experience, every last moment of it, but he really thought he had gotten over the whole aviophobia thing, at least enough to allow him to get the flight certs he needed to get a starship posting, which was apparently something he was doing now. And at first it had been fine, he didn’t have any problems the first few weeks of the class, he was actually a decent pilot as it turns out. In a simulator. But then that morning they’d gone up in a real shuttle for the first time and expected him to take a turn at the helm and Jim was right, he’d totally choked. If by choked he meant “had a panic attack in the bathroom”, but whatever.

“I don’t wanna talk about it, Jim,” he grumbled into his glass. He really, really wanted to get drunk, actually, but his exam the next day wasn’t going to take itself.

“I’m not telling you to talk about it. I’m telling you I’m going to teach you how to fly,” Jim corrected him. The “duh” was implied.

“Don’t you have an unpassable test to fixate on?” It was a testament to how little Leonard was interested in Jim’s plan that he was intentionally trying to goad his friend into another damn Maru rant.

“Wow, nice attempt, but even I’m not  _ that _ easy.”

If Leonard mumbled something akin to “coulda fooled me” then he was sure nobody could have blamed him for it.

“Look, Bones,” Jim started, crossing the room and perching on Leonard’s desk, right in his eyeline. Impossible to ignore, not that he’d been doing so hot before. “You have to pass your flight certs if you want a starship posting as an officer. You have to have a starship posting if you want to be my CMO someday. You’re perfectly capable of getting your flight certs, you just need a little more one-on-one time in the shuttle than some of the other cadets. Luckily, I have prepared for this moment and have tested into assistant basic flight instructor certification. So, Bones, I’m going to teach you how to fly.”

God help him, Jim had that same hyperfocused look in his eyes that he got when he was talking about the Maru lately. Leonard could be pretty damn stubborn when he wanted to be, which was typically most of the time, and was more than capable of playing the immovable object to Jim’s unstoppable force. But it just didn’t seem worth it. He probably would benefit from some solo shuttle time with an instructor he was comfortable with, one who would be willing to let him take it real slow, and Jim fit the bill perfectly.

“You’re not going to leave me alone until I agree, are you?” he asked. The hot blue fire in Jim’s eyes made that much obvious.

“Wasn’t planning on it, no,” Jim grinned, knowing a yes when he heard one. But Leonard sighed anyways,

“Fine. But I may throw up on you. Again.”

In two whole years of friendship, Leonard had never seen Jim as patient as when he was teaching him to fly. And it  _ was _ easier when it was just the two of them up there and Jim let him take as much time as he needed. They always teased each other, that was just how they talked, but somehow Jim knew that anything Leonard said or did or had a difficult time with while they were flying was absolutely off limits for any later ribbing. Leonard would admit, under extreme duress and with a phaser held to his head, that this was actually just what he needed. It was extremely helpful, and he was never going to be comfortable with it but eventually he got to the point where he could take off and complete all the maneuvers that Jim had programmed that he promised were more challenging than the actual exam itself. With Jim’s help, he was doing well in his basic flight course, and was able to nervously do things that other cadets in his section comfortably fucked up. There was only one problem: he couldn’t land the damn thing.

He knew how to land, in theory. He’d done it in the simulator countless times. He could sit next to Jim at the helm as his friend landed. He could even talk Jim through it as he did it, outlining each step the other man should take in landing. But he froze up every time he had to go back through the atmosphere and land. Every. Time. And it was nearing the end of the semester, he had to take his exam soon, and he was going to fail because despite all of his and Jim’s best efforts his brain just couldn’t let him  _ land _ . It was endlessly frustrating. 

Only a week before Leonard was scheduled to take - and fail - his flight certs, he was up with Jim in the shuttle again. Jim was being his classic self, refusing to believe in no-win scenarios, and he would not accept that Leonard wasn’t going to get his flight certs because of the whole landing problem. The flight they were on was pretty standard. Leonard took a loop around earth, did a few of the maneuvers Jim had programmed that he wasn’t as comfortable with, and Jim rummaged around in the back doing whatever the hell Jim Kirk got up to when he was bored. He wanted Leonard to feel like he could do it without him there as a “security blanket”, apparently. It was all going perfectly normally, at least until Jim started to make his way back up to the front to take them back to earth. Leonard was watching where he was going because he did not want to run into something, but he looked back over his shoulder when he heard Jim mutter, “oh shit”. As it turns out, he looked back at just the right time to see Jim fall backwards to the floor. Leonard slapped the autopilot button, keeping them in orbit for another rotation around earth as he jumped from his chair and bent down to his friend’s side. Jim was breathing and his pulse was steady, which were great signs, and when he got his tricorder he could see that Jim’s vitals were perfectly fine. He was just...unconscious. Randomly and for no damn reason. And of course the emergency medkit in the shuttle didn’t have anything that could help with this...whatever was going on with his best friend. These shuttles were meant for short trips only, never to be out of reach of a medical facility, so they only carried enough emergency medical supplies to stabilize a patient until they reached an actual hospital. And Jim seemed stable. Stable, but out cold for no clear reason. Sometimes Jim accused him of being paranoid, but Leonard knew that passing out cold for no reason was not a good sign, and he needed to get his friend to the hospital quickly for a more thorough examination. Especially since Jim didn’t seem to be waking up. Blacking out briefly happened, and if Jim had popped right back up maybe he would’ve chalked it up to stress or lack of sleep or something, but Jim was out cold. He may as well have been sedated.

“Okay, Jim, I’m gonna fix you, I promise,” he spoke to Jim, pushing a bit of hair out of his friend’s eyes before hefting him up into a seat and buckling him in for landing. Because they were. Leonard was going to have to land this thing. He ran his tricorder once more over Jim just to confirm he wasn’t about to die on him, then sat back down at the helm and turned off autopilot. He swallowed hard and tried not to let himself get caught up in his mental pictures of burning up and dying in the atmosphere during reentry. This was about Jim, it was more important than himself or his fears or hangups or any of that. He couldn’t possibly tell what was wrong with his friend with the minimal equipment he had up here, time was of the essence, and he was  _ not _ wasting valuable time waiting for outside help to arrive. He had the skills to do this safely and effectively so, well, he did. Jaw clenched and heart racing the whole time, he took the shuttle back through the atmosphere and landed it at Starfleet Medical, safe and sound and without a problem other than the several years that undoubtedly came off his life in the process.

But as soon as the shuttle touched down, before he could get Jim out of there and into the hospital, something strange happened. A video popped up on the viewscreen. It was Jim, smiling and looking awfully satisfied with himself.

“Hey Bones!” video Jim said, “You did it! I knew you could do it! You just needed a push was all. Now, if you would be so kind as to get into the medkit I stashed under the seats and wake me up, that’d be great. I hate being unconscious. Thanks Bones! And congrats!” 

Leonard stared, blinking slowly at the viewscreen as the view ended. He was dumbfounded, couldn't wrap his head around...whatever this was, whatever this meant, implications were flinging themselves at him and he couldn’t keep up. But there was a medical team waiting on the landing pad, waiting for him to open the door, so he signalled for them to hold off a moment and quickly found the medkit Jim had mentioned in the video. In it was a hypospray, with one vial notched in it and another one yet unused. He slipped the used vial out of the hypo, and when he read the label he nearly fell backwards out of the sheer combination of anger and relief. The goddamn kid had given himself a fucking seditive. At least Jim had bothered to grab the hypo that would wake him up. He slotted in the vial, pressed it hard into Jim’s neck, and dismissed the waiting medical team as Jim began to open his eyes. He leaned in close to Jim, all in his space, as he blinked his eyes open slowly, still feeling that warring mixture of relief and anger. Thank  _ fuck _ Jim was alright, but goddammit he was going to kill the man himself.

The lazy smile Jim gave him as he was waking up was almost enough to make Leonard waver from his anger over Jim’s stunt. Almost. Because as Jim became fully aware of his surroundings, he began to wear that same self-satisfied look he’d been wearing in the video.

“Yes!” Jim grinned, looking far too pleased with himself for someone who was sitting in a shuttle at the damn hospital for apparently no reason., “Oh, I knew this would work.”

“What the fuck were you thinking, Jim?!” Leonard exclaimed.

“Oh shit, you’re mad,” Jim realized, quite stupidly in Leonard’s opinion.

“Hell yeah I’m mad, Jim! What, I repeat, the fuck were you thinking?”

“I was thinking you needed a push. So I pushed you. I knew you knew how to do it, you just had this huge mental block with landing but you could totally push past it if you needed to. So I made you think you needed to. And, from the looks of it, it worked. So, you’re welcome.”

“‘You’re welcome’?! The hell I am! This is, by far, the worst idea you’ve ever had!”

“Hey, now, I wouldn’t go that far,” Jim stood up, putting them on even footing, but raised his hands in a placating gesture. “It worked and nobody got hurt. Trust me, I’ve had way worse ideas than this.”

“That ain’t a good thing, Jim! You could’ve been seriously injured! You’re not trained to administer shit like that, what if you’d messed up the dosage?”

“But I didn’t.”

“What if you’d hurt yourself falling backwards like that?”

“Uh, yeah, that admittedly took effect quicker than I thought. But I  _ didn’t _ get hurt, so…”

“That’s exactly why you shouldn’t be dosing yourself with drugs you don’t know how to use! What if I hadn’t seen that message and gave you a hypo that just made it worse?”

“But you didn’t, and I trust you.”

“What if I hadn’t been able to land the shuttle?”

“But you  _ did _ , and you could’ve always called for an emergency beam out but I knew you could because Bones I trust you,” Jim insisted and there was probably something significant in his repetition of that phrase but Leonard was still too angry and frankly filled with residual adrenaline and reeling from having had to fear for Jim’s safety to care about what Jim was saying between his lines.

“I don’t give a good goddamn,” Leonard declared, “This was stupid and reckless and I don’t care if your stupid little plan worked that doesn’t make it any less  _ stupid _ .”

“You were worried about me,” Jim declared, bright blue eyes widening like he had just discovered something groundbreaking.

“Of course I was worried about you! You passed the fuck out in the middle of a shuttle for no apparent reason. Jim, you made me think you were seriously ill! I need you to understand that, I need you to realize what you just put me through because you thought it’d get me over my mental ‘wall’ or whatever the fuck. I don’t give a shit if it worked or not, it wasn’t worth it.”

Leonard grabbed his bag and headed for the door. Jim caught him, though, wrapping long fingers around his wrist,

“Wait, Bones, where are you going?”

“I am going to take a flitter back to the Academy. The least you could fucking do after all this is return the damn shuttle.”

“Look, I’m sorry, okay,” Jim admitted, and Leonard could see in his eyes that he was. This was a somewhat rare convergence of Jim actually saying he was sorry and Jim actually  _ being _ sorry at the same time. This time, Leonard wasn’t too angry to understand the significance of it. “I’m sorry,” Jim repeated. “I was out of ideas, I didn’t know how to help you get past this, but I had to do  _ something _ . Really, this is the best iteration of this plan I had. The original one was to eat one of those almond nutrient bars and send myself into anaphylactic shock right in the middle of the shuttle. I’m sure you’ll agree this was better than that.”

“You don’t get brownie points for not actually almost killing yourself. I don’t know what you’re so worried about this for anyways. It’s  _ my _ test.”

Jim’s hand was still wrapped around Leonard’s wrist and he squeezed it tighter as he locked eyes with his best friend and, as serious as he’d ever been, declared, “I am not leaving you behind, Bones.”

And wasn’t that a parroting of a phrase Leonard had told Jim about a dozen times> Something warm shot through him at the words and the steadiness of Jim’s gaze held in his own. Jim continued,

“When we graduate this year, you’re going out there with me. I’m not leaving you behind, Bones. I don’t want to, I  _ can’t _ , I…”

Jim cut himself off then, and then suddenly Jim was all in Leonard’s space, wrapping an arm around his neck, and then, Jesus Christ, Jim’s lips were on his, and Jim Kirk was  _ kissing _ him. Leonard felt like he got the wind knocked out of him. Again, but better this time. Jim was kissing him, hesitant but almost pleading, like he was trying to communicate something with the touch of his lips and tongue that he couldn’t make his mouth say. And Leonard kissed him back, because of course he did. It was  _ Jim _ . The very center of his universe. And he’d thought of this before, of course, because he didn’t know if anyone could be friends with Jim for over two years and never think of kissing those pretty pink lips or quite a bit more, but now that it was happening he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it even more often.

It didn’t last long, though, not nearly long enough, because just when Leonard had recovered a bit from the shock of it all and started to pull Jim closer to kiss him back, Jim pulled away slightly.

“Okay?” Jim asked, slightly breathless, forehead pressed to Leonard’s. “I just...can’t, okay?”

_ I can’t let you go, I can’t live without you, I can’t imagine a future without you by my side, I can’t hold this back anymore _ ...there was a whole galaxy of implications between Jim’s half said sentences and that goddamn kiss, and Leonard found he loved each and every single one of them.

“Okay,” he finally nodded against Jim’s forehead.

“Forgive me, Bones?” Jim requested, voice softer than Leonard had ever heard it before.

“‘Course I will, Jim. I was always going to. You didn’t have to kiss me into it.”

“That’s not why I did it.”

“Oh?”

“I just, I dunno. I realized I wanted it, so I did it.”

That was such a typical Jim Kirk answer that Leonard had to laugh. He pulled his forehead away from Jim’s and shook his head,

“Typical. But, Jim, this better not happen again.”

“Wait, the kiss, or…”

“The whole stunt with the sedative. On the contrary, that kiss damn well better happen again.”

Jim grinned, bright and genuine and warm as the sun itself. A true, real Jim Kirk smile always made Leonard feel like smiling himself. The kid was damn gorgeous, that was for sure.

“Okay,” Jim agreed, then immediately set to work keeping that promise. It was even better the second time, Leonard realized. He didn’t know where this was going exactly, but he knew that with Jim it was going to be exciting and scary and worth every damn second of it.

“We can’t stay in the damn medical shuttle landing all day, Jim,” Leonard finally said when they pulled away the second time. “And you’re not off the hook yet. You’re flying. And no funny business.”

Jim grinned, all perfect and beautiful and swollen lips as he broke away from Leonard to sit at the helm. “Who, me? Never.”

Sure, maybe Jim Kirk was going to be the death of him, but Leonard found he really wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
